Tag Archives: interviews

Trump’s rise came as a preacher of the prosperity gospel. His promise to repeal Obamacare and replace it with just about nothing in particular relied as much on dissatisfaction with the current law as it did the delirious optimism of prosperity, and the idea that the real way to better America was to make life better for healthy and wealthy people, and to further link the two.

Will coal miners, unemployed auto workers, and small farmers in Appalachia fare better under the AHCA? Almost certainly not now. But if they work hard enough and have enough virtue, maybe. And at the end of the tunnel of aspiration is the favor that the AHCA’s brazen regressive health tax provides for the healthy and wealthy. It’s a moral restructuring of the health economy.

As Newkirk says elsewhere in his article, most Republicans aren’t as intellectually honest accidentally truthful as Brooks. They argue that their ideas of health care are somehow will make life better for the poor and the sick. I have no doubt that some Republicans have even persuaded themselves that this is, indeed, the case. “To be fair,” Brooks himself says in the unedited interview, “…I think our society under those circumstances”–that is, people being sick “through no fault of their own”– “needs to help.” He probably thinks that the AHCA is helping. Bless his shriveled little heart.

Mo Brooks made a Kinsley gaffe, which is to say that he fully comprehends what he’s talking about and inadvertently demonstrated his competence to a public that should be properly horrified at the prospect that he meant what he said and has the power to do something about it. Democrats seem to think that the AHCA is a major political blunder. I’m not convinced. Voters were willing to support a House Speaker who baldly proclaims that wealth = freedom and a president who espouses, according to the very same House Speaker, the “textbook definition of racism.” The only question facing low-income Republican voters with pre-existing conditions, I suspect, is which scapegoat is going to bear the blame next for the consequences of their own political choices. I guess we’ll find out.